


a god kissing carrion

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-30
Updated: 2011-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davesprite is basically Edward Cullen, only orange, gooey, disinclined to drink anything and especially Faygo, ironic, mortal, and in love with himself.</p><p><i>Yeah.</i></p><p>Oh and written for Homestuck1000. DO YOU DETECT A TREND.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a god kissing carrion

Okay, so sometimes he watches him sleep. Not during the last nap, which hasn't happened yet, and not on any of the other occasions where there are hordes of ogres in the area. But sometimes.

It's not actually an indication of any obsessive squishiness a la shitty YA literature and/or fetid bogs. It's just that he doesn't have anything better to do.

Sprites are basically just very efficient information processors, he's learning, kind of fucking late: a sort of artificial prosthesis for whatever sad stump of natural reasoning power the player possesses. (Irony: he didn't learn this while still a player, making his plans on his short sight. But the more you know.

He probably needs to come up with a new word to apply to situations that are actually ironic. Sometime soon.)

This means a couple of things. It means he gets and keeps more data about the composition of every stillframe moment than Dave will absorb about the world that's his now in all the weeks he'll spend there. Even the hours he'll regurgitate like a mama bird (fuck that metaphor, but it's too late now, gotta keep rolling when you're in a river in egypt and the current is strong at your back) over and over and over again, until they're sheened in sick sweet bile and spit and the seconds have no taste left- he won't learn them as well as Davesprite does the very first time through.

(The very second. But no; because that was before he was this.)

The other thing it means is that even on the very first time through, Davesprite doesn't get to taste the clock face. He knows and knows and knows and suddenly it doesn't mean anything. He can list the hexadecimal of every color in his sensory radius, which is fixed at several fucking miles out, thanks very much. With total objectivity, too; no need to adjust for light and shade, when it's not like he has real eyes to reassure. He checked. There's nothing under the shades but the faint sting of contained lasers. He can even come up with hilarious names and life histories for the colors, about a third of a time. But all it is is, he's analyzing light, bit by byte, and the seen world arrives to his processing centers already broken into manageable parts.

Whatever he's thinking with doesn't bother with synthesis. Synthesis is slow. His gamegiven brain takes glinting shards of reality and transforms them into small fragmentary reactions, the most useful possible content and the most contextually fucking persuasive style of delivery. A translator, not beatsmith.

Qualia, Rose says when he gets around to asking. That's what's missing. And, with completely unabashed interest: you're an effective p-zombie.

P-ghost, he corrects her. P-fucking-feathery-orange-ghost.

Yes, she says, and the ramifications would be enormously important if Earth's finest academic minds were not now a slick bed for meteors. But that's unlife.

Then she excuses herself, claiming desecration duty. Davesprite worries about the desecration, and the worry is a weird, terrible mix of 1. his- the sprite's- self-preservative instincts as a string of code in the greater book she wants to burn and 2. someone with her face was his sister once. His friend and his only.

(3. The someone is still there, a shadow of ownership over those borrowed eyes, an old weight to the cadence of purple text. It's not library property that will ever be returned, Rose Lalonde's skin, but maybe the library came with it. Some kind of wheely deal.)

They saved their friends, the two of them. They saved the whole damn timeline.

(They're a trap, and closing.)

But Dave needs him or thinks he needs him and he does have to sleep.

So Davesprite covers for him. And, yeah, he watches him, too, converts his coulda-shoulda-woulda self in with the rest, because-

Because there's something about adding his alpha presence to the mix that makes it easier for him to pretend that he's reading this space with the nerves of a real boy, not just- _receiving_ it, through every square inch of a permeable pixel membrane.

Dave is a graceless sleeper, drooling onto his stylin' tux and twitching like the vein in Karkat's forehead has probably been twitching for at least the past six sweeps. (And maybe longer, Davesprite thinks; it's possible it was twitching before trolls' distant ancestors evolved a circulatory system. Assuming trolls have circulatory systems. Or evolved. Whatever.) He wrinkles his shirt by trying to nestle into hard tile, and before long the metal grating has divided his soft cheek into pink diamonds.

It is almost painfully uncool. It would _be_ painfully uncool, but even this close to his proper flesh and blood Davesprite can't summon the echo of pain from his human recollection, half-submerged in bullshit as they are. And temperature is Greek to him. Very Greek, in that it's inexplicably a huge part of this game's stage and still basically meaningless, except as one more force to fight.

Dave sweats like a champ while he sleeps, too, the slightly concave place at the base of his skull fucking abrim with perspiration; the trailing ends of hair there gathered dark and gleaming (every separate clump a low-quality gradient from efe9d2 to 937b47).

All in all, Davesprite is kind of surprised Bro hadn't been continually ribbing him about his slumbering douchebag faces, back in the fucking day. But then he guesses Bro probably didn't waste a lot of time watching him sleep. Thank fuck for small mercies.

(He thinks maybe it's easier because here, with the body he used to own so close he can see the fine down on the knuckles, the supplementary hum of his hungry little translating soul recedes, a little. Enough to let the once and fucking future knight in him layer memory over the moment, until the texture of Dave's open mouth registers not as total surface area over two dimensional reduction but as chapped and cushiony and glazed in brilliant, redly reflective drool.)

It's not the only red thing in Dave's face, though. And-

"Whoa," says Dave, opening his eyes the rest of the way.

Whoopsy fucking daisy.

Davesprite whips back, quick as the ectoplasmic goddamn chicken he is, his tail arcing orange through the heat-hazy air. "Good morning, Skaiashine," he says, "are we all ready for the haut breakfast cuisine available on a planet where even the fucking crocodiles eat metal mushrooms?"

Dave just looks at him. The shades have reasserted themselves, by now- couture is a lot more aggressive in the Incipisphere, Davesprite knows, and he wonders if Dave could take them off if he wanted to. (Will later, to his hellacious dissatisfaction, find out.) But the flash of light off black glass is as eloquent as those, you know, _rubescent orbs_ could ever be.

Davesprite meets his gaze steadily, or at least keeps his transparent face pointing the right direction; the part of him that could have been said to be looking back, though, is already lost in a wild wood of trivia and the semicolons that hold the game together.

It occurs to him that there's probably at least one way to bring it back without hitting Dave over the head with something heavy. Proximity and the other him holding the fuck still; those are the things in which he'll catch his fleeing consciousness.

But he does have an actual job here. So he does nothing. He hovers. He digs the silence deep.

"Keeping watch, huh?" Dave says, eventually.

"Yep," says Davesprite.

"Your eagle or at least kinda avian eye misses nothing, right?"

"Yep."

"Fine," says Dave. "Let's go."

They go. After all, there's a game to win.

(Steel jaws to shut. (An end, somewhere, for him.))


End file.
